Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., doesn’t approve of presidents’ designating national monuments and takes a dark view of bills to create wilderness areas, but nothing gets Doc’s ire up more than the Endangered Species Act. Hastings and a dozen other House Republicans on Tuesday trotted out a series of “targeted reforms” to the 1973 law, sponsored […]
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Shell Oil won’t drill for oil in the Arctic Ocean this summer, the latest in a series of mishaps and delays to a program in which the Big Oil giant has invested billions. Shell CEO Ben Van Buerden made the announcement in London, citing a slide in company profits as well as a U.S. […]
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The federal government failed to adequately evaluate environmental risks and the potential size of oil spills when it approved oil drilling in Alaska’s remote Chukchi Sea, a federal appellate court ruled on Wednesday. The ruling, by a panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, once again throws into doubt plans by Shell Oil […]
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Dollars from the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) helped create a white-tailed deer sanctuary along the Columbia River, preserve bluffs and farmland on Whidbey Island and buy up old mining claims deep in the North Cascades National Park. The federal program — which has helped save critical Washington lands for 48 years — was […]
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Species survival is taking a back seat to politics across Western North America, and globally, as 2013 comes to a close. If you are a four-footed carnivore, or a horned inhabitant of Africa’s plains, the short-term prospect is of great peril. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services is out to end Endangered Species Act protection […]
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An inter-agency federal panel wants to end federal protection of grizzly bears under the Endangered Species Act, in the three-state Greater Yellowstone ecosystem surrounding America’s first, most-famous national park. “This is not a decision to de-list the grizzly; it is a recommendation to write a new rule,” said Chris Servheen, longtime coordinator of the U.S. […]
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The British Columbia government wants to open two big areas of the province, one just north of the U.S.-Canada border, to the trophy hunting of grizzly bears, arguing against the advice of bear researchers that populations of ursus horribilis can absorb the hunt. The proposed “limited entry hunting,” to be permitted in the spring, is […]
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Seventy-five members of Congress are demanding that the Obama administration end all protection of the gray wolf as “endangered” or “threatened” under the federal Endangered Species Act, in an effort organized by Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Washington. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has already de-listed wolves in the Northern Rocky Mountains — leading to big, […]
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The designation of polar bears as “threatened” under the federal Endangered Species Act, due to loss of habitat, was upheld Friday by a Washington, D.C., appellate court, which ruled against a challenge from the state of Alaska and allied industry interests. The polar bear received the designation in 2008 under the Bush administration, which was […]
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